May 28, 2010

Mythology Film Archives: the avant-garde in 90 minutes

“The
theaters of the Underground—often five or six docile customers in an improbable
place that looks like a bombed-out air shelter or the downstairs ladies room at
the old Paramount—offer a weirdly satisfying experience.For two dollars, the spectator gets
five bedraggled two-reelers, and, after a sojourn with incompetence, chaos,
nouveau-culture taste, he leaves this land’s-end theater feeling unaccountably
spry.”

Manny Farber
wasn’t the only writer mystified by the atmosphere of the typical avant-garde cinematheque.In the early 60s, “critics who visited the Charles [Theater] were as apt to review the
audience as the movies," and Amos Vogel considered its unsavory character to be
“very positive… [a] properly bedraggled beat audience spitting in the face of
the bourgeoisie” (Hoberman & Rosenbaum).It is somewhat
difficult to imagine that ambience now when attending a screening at Anthology Film Archives, a
prestigious institution known internationally for its preservation and exhibition of
experimental works.Originally
conceived of as the first film museum by Jonas Mekas, P. Adams Sitney, Jerome
Hill, Peter Kubelka and Stan Brakhage, it opened its doors in 1970 at Joseph
Papp’s Public Theater.Somewhat
itinerant in its early years, it reappeared in 1974 at 80 Wooster Street, and by 1979 it had moved to the Second Avenue Courthouse;
facing extensive renovations, the theater closed its doors for almost ten years and has remained a vital force ever since.

Anthology is
seeing its 40th anniversary this year, and the programmers are
celebrating with a three-day screening of Chuck Workman’s new documentary, Visionaries: Jonas Mekas and the (Mostly)
American Avant-Garde Cinema, which had its debut at the Tribeca Film
Festival last month.An unlikely
candidate, Workman has edited Oscar sequences for the past two decades as well
as Michael Jackson concert footage, though his more recent docs—The Score and Superstar: The Life and Times of Andy Warhol—have moved into the
realm of countercultural history.When asked by ArtsBeat
how he reconciles these two poles of his CV, the filmmaker somewhat blandly
responded, “I would do it because I want to do it, and I hope you like it.”

There are
not many documentaries about avant-garde cinema, which seems to have hit a
particularly low level of cultural relevance in the 1990s from which it is now emerging.The only contemporary film that comes to mind is Martina Kudlácek’s Notes
on Marie Menken from 2006.A
somewhat haphazard biography of the mother of the New American Cinema and distinctive Warhol star (she appeared in Chelsea
Girls toward the end of her life), Notes operated under the mistaken
impression that experimental subject matter necessitates a meandering
structure.One could learn more
about her life and work, and in less time, from reading the chapter on Menken
in Brakhage’s Film at Wit’s End.What could have been a much-needed
entry point for the neophyte into the oeuvre of a perennially neglected artist wastes
precious screen time in indulging Gerard Malanga’s aimless monologues.

Visionaries takes a more straightforward
approach.Its intent is to expose
the viewer, presumably unacquainted or only vaguely familiar with the
historical avant-garde, to as much of its substance as possible.And it does this well, using the figure of Jonas
Mekas for its loose narrative thread.Mekas, who
also appeared in Kudlácek’s film as well as in each of his own diaristic film
sagas, has always had a peculiar star power with his prominent liver spot,
halted speech and accordion interludes.The octogenarian is
still bristling with energy and passion for cinema.An extraordinary man, this Lithuanian expatriate co-created
and edited Film Culture between 1955 and 1996; wrote the Village Voice’s “Movie Journal” column from 1958 to 1978 (from
which he was somewhat ignominiously dispelled); helped found the Filmmakers’
Distribution Center (now defunct) and the New York Filmmakers’ Cooperative
(still intact); and bequeathed one of the great documents of American
filmmaking, the epic Walden (1969), a
mere three-hour excerpt from his ongoing Diaries,
Notes and Sketches.And the
list is far from comprehensive.

Like
Kudlácek’s film, Visionaries is shot on rather ugly video—clearly a
no-budget, self-funded production undertaken entirely out of love for the
cinematic hinterland.It does have
the unfortunate downside of making many of the films it excerpts look rather
bad, as if filmed off a screen rather than properly transferred.Sound is by no means professionally
mixed.The viewer is thrown into a
world of brief clips and talking heads, among which number Sitney, Fred Camper,
Scott MacDonald, Amy Taubin, the late Norman Mailer, Su Friedrich, Ken Jacobs,
Kenneth Anger, the inimitable Robert Downey Sr., David Lynch, and, of course, Jonas Mekas.Somewhat nervous in its desire to
inculcate the young’uns with a parallel film history, we see snippets of
work by artists like Menken, Brakhage, Warhol, Jacobs, Kubelka, Mike Snow,
Ernie Gehr, Storm De Hirsch, Bruce Baillie, Bruce Conner, Shirley Clarke and
Jack Smith in rapid-fire succession.While it is good to present the avant-garde in all its diversity and
complexity, it is also somewhat misleading, promising the viewer visual pyrotechnics
and constant novelty when many of these works are in fact slow, extended meditations on questions of
form and structure—sometimes limiting themselves to a single space, often
one, two, three, four or more hours long.On top of that, most of the material offered by the scholars veers
toward the realm of platitudes, a generic conception of the experimental world as one of
‘unlimited freedom,’ ‘spontaneity,’ ‘self-expression’ and what have you.It all seems a little too pat, and the
feeling of smorgasbord may be a residue of Workman’s commercial ventures, as no
montage is complete without sweeping music to buffer it.What we really need is a series on the
level of Art 21, something that can
carry out a sustained investigation of a sorely underappreciated style.

It would
have been interesting to problematize the avant-garde to a degree: for
example, its narcissism, which Parker Tyler called “a crude, inept propaganda of ecstasy and happiness.”Or the notions of exclusivity
surrounding Anthology itself, whose famous “Essential Cinema” program of approx. 330
films excludes work by any contemporary European artists—the
exception being Kubelka, himself one of the committee members.Or the question of defining the
avant-garde as a coherent movement at all, most notably in the wound which
separates the distinct flavors of East and West Coast filmmaking (and New
York’s inevitable dominance over San Francisco).Or the
avant-garde’s virtual descent into invisibility outside the university circuit, which prompted Amos Vogel to
ask: how truly subversive are “five heavy cans of 35 mm film and nowhere to show
them”?Today, the scandals surrounding ‘lewd’ works like Scorpio Rising and
Flaming Creatures have little more than a certain period charm. Actually, Workman’s film does suggest the latter dilemma in an
odd moment outside Anthology.A
group of young filmgoers who have rented out the theater in order to show their
own work are asked questions at random: “Do you know what Anthology is?”“Do you know who Stan Brakhage
is?”All reply in the negative,
except for one fellow who enlightens us as to the fact that Brakhage was “a video
artist” whose pieces are only seen by “arty students in college.”But, then again, most of the kids lined
up for their vanity screening didn’t know who Fellini was either.

Despite reservations, worthwhile
moments abound in Visionaries.It is always refreshing to hear from
Kenneth Anger, the bizarre Luciferian who appears in a hockey jersey and informs
us that he is “definitely not” part of a queer cinema movement, that he “hates
the term” and that it “is a deep insult and kind of trivializing a deep
emotion… They’re films by Kenneth Anger.I don’t need any other label.”We see Jonas Mekas prowling around the endless rows of film canisters in
Anthology’s library; Mel Brooks’ first film, a wonderful send-up of Fischinger
and McLaren’s abstract animations; Peter Kubelka presenting his standard but by
no means dull pedagogy; some doofus toting a wine glass at the Maya Stendhal
Gallery opining that an experimental film is “like a poem, like a haiku,” while
Standish Lawder’s Necrology plays in
the background—a clear sign of the rift which set this small enclave of tinkerers
apart from the sterility of the white cube.There is much here to see and to savor.After all, it’s a celebration, and who
wants to spoil the party?

Visionaries is playing June 4-6 at Anthology
Film Archives, 32 Second Avenue, corner of Second and Second.